Health Goal for April:   Image Book

  An Image page is a powerful tool for renovating our belief systems; that is, the way we feel  about ourselves and the way we see and experience the world.

                 Your Image page appeals directly to the part of your brain that responds to feelings and images.  The right side of the brain – the domain of our feelings, our creative – cannot distinguish between an experience that is imagined and one that is real.

                 Therefore, it is unable to reject an invalid, wrong, or untrue the images and feelings we offer it.  By its very nature it is compelled, in time, to reproduce in outer reality everything it accepts as true in the secret workshop of the mind.

Properly used, your Image page brings into focus the new elements you choose to project upon the screen of your creative imagination.

A product of your real self, your image page consists of pictures and word symbols that your higher self selects to more clearly define what it truly is and what it truly wants to achieve.  Your higher self is successful, confident, free of fear and perfectly capable of causing astonishing changes within you and in your life.

By focusing the energies of your mind upon the qualities you want to express, the things you want to have, the events you want to experience, your creative imagination will simply cause them to become reality.

Use your Image page to help you overcome defects and shortcomings by creating pages to reflect your strengths, goals and aspirations.

How to Create your Image Page

Cut out (from magazines, catalogs and so on) words and pictures that describe the goals, and affirmations that you would like to achieve.

You may not believe, right now, that they describe you, but they do indeed describe how you expect to feel about yourself.  In deciding which words and pictures to cut out, reach so far beyond your present concepts about yourself and your world that these new ideas almost embarrass you.  By not including actual faces in the pictures you clip, you’ll be able to more readily identify with the new image you are depicting – because your mind will automatically place your face on the person depicted.

Glue or paste the cut out pictures in collage fashion on a sheet of paper and create a page on the aspects of your life that you want to change, develop or expand.  Glue and paste the cut out words to create affirmations that support that change.  Let those pages describe your positive inner qualities, your emerging self- confidence, your warm and loving nature on the

How to Use Your Image Book Using your Image page takes only moments each day and will produce dramatic results.

Review your pages daily.  Pick times that fit your schedule:  in the morning before your day begins, in the evening before you retire, or (even better) both.

As you look at the pictures and words, feel that you are this person now and that everything on this page has already come into your life.  Feel that the page is an accomplished fact, even if it isn’t so yet.  Remember:  your creative imagination cannot tell the difference between what is real and what you are imagining.  For the page to become you and part of your life, the page needs to be a present-tense experience – not a future one.  Feel it now!

Your pages act as affirmations, as a prayer in visible form, and as goals firmly set in your mind.  Focusing your attention upon them daily causes the Law - of Mind action to work for you.  That is, whatever con conceive and believe in, you will achieve.    This is accomplished by joining your conceptions with feelings of excitement, gratitude, and a sense of already having accomplished these things you are rehearsing in your mind.

In a short time, it will take only a glance at a page to conjure up within you these positive responses.  Other pages, in which you have really stretched yourself, may take longer for the full believable response – but it will come!

Knowing that you are taking action to achieve your inner and outer goals makes your life exciting and fulfilling.  Use the pages regularly.  Your Image page may not yet be finished, but continue to work with  the existing page while you complete additional ones on other topics.

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Chiropractic Philosophy:   We are a Nation on Medication

We have become a society devoid of patience.  We demand and expect instant relief from pain and discomfort.  We are a nation on medication.

             Don’t forget, most medication will only cover up our symptoms and make us temporarily feel better.  As soon as the drugs wear off, our symptoms return and it’s back to the drugstore for more of the same.

 Drugs weaken the body’s natural healing mechanisms and it becomes more and more dependent on drugs.  Stop the cycle!  Chiropractic can often free you from endless drug dependency.

Thousands of people are dying from drug side effects and surgery.  Over 2,ooo people die every year from aspirin!  Over 48,000 people die each year from unnecessary surgery!  Health doesn’t come from a bottle of  pills. 

The world’s best drugstore is within you.  Chiropractic works with your natural recuperative powers to allow your body to heal itself from the inside.  Health always comes from within.  It just doesn’t happen any other way.

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Symptoms:  Childhood Obesity

        Linked to TV

  Because most available treatments for obese children have yielded only modest or temporary effects, prevention is considered key to counteracting this all-too-common condition.  American children spend more time watching television and videotapes and playing video games than on any other activity except for sleeping, adding fuel to speculation that TV viewing may be one of the most easily modifiable causes of childhood obesity.

Two public elementary schools provided the setting for this study designs to evaluate the potential association between television viewing and childhood weight.  Nearly 200 third and fourth-grade students participated in the study, in which children from one school received an 18-lesson, six month classroom curriculum to reduce television, videotape and video game use.  The intervention was based solely on teaching children to budget their entertainment time and din not include any other lifestyle modifications, such as exercise.  Children from the second school comprised the control group and received no intervention.

Compared with the control group, the intervention group showed significant decreases in body-mass index, triceps skin fold thickness, waist circumference and waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio following the six month educational program.  These changes were accompanied by statistically decreases in reported television viewing and meals eaten in front of the television.

As the authors suggest, these findings emphasize that “reducing television, videotape and video game use may be a promising population-based approach to prevent childhood obesity.”

Robinson TN. Reducing children’s television viewing to prevent obesity.  Journal of the American Medical Association, Oct. 27, 1999:282(16), pp1561-67.

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Nutrition:  Reducing Birth Defects with Folic Acid

Neural-tube defects represent a world-wide problem, affecting an estimated 300,000 fetuses or infants each year.  Previous research has suggested the potential value of folic acid supplementation in preventing birth defects, an observation that the authors of this study hop to further validate.

As part of a public health campaign conducted from 1993-1995 in two areas of China (the southern region, an area with low rates of neuraltube defects, and the northern region, an area with higher rates of defects), pregnancy outcomes were evaluated in women asked to take folic acid through their first trmester of pregnancy.  Folic acid was administered in the form of a 400-microgram pill taken daily.

Rates of neural-tube defects were compared among the fetuses or infants of 130,142 women who took folic acid at any time before or during pregnancy vs. the 117,689 women who did not take folic acid.  Rates of birth defects were as follows:

- Women who did not take folic acid: 4.8 neural tube defects per 1,000 pregnancies (of at least 20 weeks gestation) in the northern region; 1.0 per 1,000 in the southern region.

- Women who did take folic acid:  1.0 neural tube defects per 1,000 pregnancies in the northern region; 0.6 per 1,000 in the southern region.

The authors note that the preventive effecdt demonstrated in the southern region of China, in which the baseline rate of neural-tube defects is similar to that in the United States and elsewhere, suggests that “daily ingestion of 400 micrograms of folic acid alone during the periconceptional period may help reduce the rate of first occurrence of neural-tube defects in many parts of the world.

Berry RJ, Zhu L, Erickson JD et al. Prevention of neural tube defects with folic acid in China.  The New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 11, 1999:341(20),pp1485-90.